Nick Ansell steps into the leadership of our EPR programme
How did a football-loving Norfolk physio who liked tech become the leader of our EPR Programme?
Ask Nick Ansell, the new EPR Programme Director, as while his career path is packed with digital experience from implementing new systems at community trusts to answering GPs concerns about the shared care record, he says it’s all thanks to his days as a young physio at James Paget.
He’s spent his whole career in Norfolk, he knows what it's like working at our acute hospitals, he knows Norfolk, he knows the staff, he knows our patients and he knows our challenges. He knows just how much we need to shift from paper files and charts, indecipherable handwriting and having to log on to several different systems.
A football and karate loving teenager, he was drawn to a physiotherapy career, through sport - and quickly realised sport was a very small part of the work: “As a physio you don’t know who is going to be walking through the door, all you have is a pillow, plinth and towel; you ask questions and have to make it work.”
Now Nick says he uses those solution-finding clinical skills every day in our digital EPR programme, pointing out that many of those building and implementing our Norfolk and Waveney EPR have a strong clinical background.
“A lot of our clinical reasoning and thought processes are used with digital - how can we solve a problem?” he says, adding that clinicians are focused on improving their patients’ lives and that’s the same with the EPR programme.
“You get used to thinking: how can we make the best of what we have got, how can we make it appropriate and give the best care possible?”
He found himself on the digital leadership path as a young Paget physio being told ‘you like tech, look at this’ while on rotation in a community Trust implementing its first digital system. He did, he loved tech, and was soon juggling clinical and digital work before focusing completely on digital - and a goal of making the right thing to do the easy thing to do.
That’s a focus for his leadership of the EPR programme, keeping everyone working together to the same standardised, best-practice goal.
"I have stepped into this role but it is the team that is the key to this," he says, proud of the determination and Meditech expertise within the EPR programme team.
“Meditech is not out of the box, you have to build it to get what you need,” he says, explaining that’s why people cannot yet be shown what it will look like for Norfolk and Waveney – it is still being built.
“There is no one else within the UK doing the breadth and scope of what we are doing, that does mean that we are growing a team who are invested and determined to make it happen, the expertise they have grown has been phenomenal.”
The team theme continues out of work too for Nick; the sports-loving Programme Director coaches a teenager’s football team and enjoys family life with four children aged 10 to 15.